Badenoch seized the final PMQs of the year to launch a stinging attack on Starmer’s Brexit betrayals. Reports have been swirling that Labour is mulling a major climbdown on Brexit: reopening free movement and potentially aligning with EU laws on agriculture and food – both of which Downing Street has pointedly refused to rule out. Meanwhile, as Guido first revealed, Labour have assembled a major EU ‘Surrender Unit’ within the Cabinet Office tasked with unpicking Brexit…
Badenoch blasted:
“We learn he’s about to give away our hard-won Brexit freedoms. The truth is they are punching the British people in the face.”
A squirming Starmer dodged the accusation, instead retreating to his well-worn lines about Tory “black holes” and NHS waiting lists. Someone must be reading Guido in CCHQ…
- Chris Hinchliff (Lab)
- Blake Stephenson (Con)
- Rebecca Smith (Con)
- Amanda Martin (Lab)
- Kirith Entwistle (Lab)
- John Lamont (Con)
- John Grady (Lab)
- Jack Rankin (Con)
- Ian Byrne (Lab)
- Dave Doogan (SNP)
- Jodie Gosling (Lab)
- Jo White (Lab)
- Peter Prinsley (Lab)
- Debbie Abrahams (Lab)
- Richard Foord (LibDem)
The new Bangladeshi government is continuing hardcore recriminations against ousted dictator Sheikh Hasina and her network, after they were turfed out of office in July this year. Hasina herself is still in hiding in India…
The government has briefed that the renewed Anti-Corruption Commission has started investigations into “embezzlement” by Hasina “and other members of her family.” Labour City Minister Tulip Siddiq, Hasina’s niece, is confirmed to be under investigation and is named in the Bangladeshi media:
“The Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) has started an inquiry into allegations of Tk80,000 crore embezzlement by ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina, her sister Sheikh Rehana, and other members of their families from different development projects initiated during the Awami League regime.
Of the amount, Tk59,000 crore has been reportedly embezzled from the Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant project.
The other family members include Hasina’s son Sajeeb Wazed Joy and Rehana’s daughter Tulip Siddiq.
ACC Director General MD Akhtar Hossain disclosed the matter while talking to reporters this afternoon (17 December).
Hasina, Rehana, Joy, Tulip, and others have been accused of embezzling Tk59,000 crore from the RNPP project.
Besides, Hasina is also accused of embezzling Tk21,000 crore from eight development projects of Ashrayan, BEZA and BEPZA through abuse of power, fraud, irregularities, and corruption.
Hasina resigned and fled to India with Rehana on 5 August in the face of a mass uprising led by students, which toppled the autocratic Awami League government led by her after 15 years of ruling.”
Siddiq hailed dictator Hasina as her “role model.“ Guido has contacted Tulip to ask whether she will cooperate with the Bangladeshi government’s probe…
UPDATE: Labour sources say the claims are “spurious” and that Siddiq has not been contacted.
Latest quarterly civil service headcount figures reveal that there are now 515,000 pen-pushers – as high as it was under arch blob-lover Tony Blair in 2006. And 2,000 more since Labour came into power…
The Ministry of Justice added another 595 staff to its ranks, the Department for Work and Pensions rose by 355, and the Treasury brought in 315 more mandarins. William Yarwood at the TaxPayers’ Alliance said:
“Taxpayers are sick to the back teeth of coughing up for evermore useless civil servants. Despite there being more civil servants than since the Blair era, the British state is more dysfunctional and decrepit than ever before. The government needs to take an axe to our sprawling civil service and scrap all functions and jobs that aren’t necessary.”
Despite Starmer’s calls to reform the civil service, briefings that up to 10,000 jobs across the civil service could face the chop and the now infamous “tepid bath of decline” comments, the now no longer “world-leading” civil service continues to balloon for the eighth year in a row. As Guido revealed no fewer than 100 are employed by the EU surrender Unit…
Labour is facing a massive backlash this morning for its decision not to pay out billions to the ‘Waspi women’ despite a recommendation from a parliamentary ombudsman to shell out between £1,000 and £2,950 to those affected by the well-publicised pension changes. Labour has even managed to lose the Mirror…
Work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall said in the Commons yesterday that compensation isn’t worth the £10 billion cost to the taxpayer as Reeves defends her decision this morning: “I didn’t judge that it would be the best use of taxpayers money to pay an expensive compensation bill for something most people knew was happening.” A decision Labour tried to delay as long as it could…
Guido is old enough to remember Labour’s position before the election, as laid out by Angela Rayner:
“This is their money that they had stolen from them. It was completely unacceptable. Any government should act responsibly to these women.”
Starmer said in July 2022 that Waspi women ‘faced injustice.’ Minister Rushanara Ali instead says this morning that Labour is “focussed on the living standards of pensioners – including Waspi women” as it blocks compensation. Pious briefing about their plight has come back to bite Labour – who would have guessed…
UPDATE: Well-established left-wing MPs like Rachael Maskell have voiced their opposition to Labour’s position as the row extends to the Labour backbenches.
An interesting video appeared on Kemi’s X yesterday, accusing Starmer of being weak in international dealmaking: “every time Labour negotiates, the UK loses”. Well there’s no doubt about that, just look at Chagos…
The Tory leader went on: “Keir Starmer is reopening the Brexit wars after we ended them. The deal he wants will give power to the European Court to overrule the British Parliament. Every time Labour negotiates, the UK loses”. As Guido has extensively chronicled, Keir Starmer is indeed preparing to renegotiate many of the major planks of Brexit over the next year. Guido was the first to reveal that the PM has assembled a large group of Cabinet Office civil servants to undo Brexit, dubbed the ‘Surrender Unit’…
As former Brexit negotiator and leavers’ hero Lord Frost said at the weekend:
“This huge unit is getting ready for a major renegotiation – it will have more people than I had for the original deal with the EU in 2020. Everyone in this Government really wants to rejoin the EU one day. Only public opinion is stopping them. So they are trying to act in secrecy and conceal their plans to align with EU rules, to bring back EU law and to give away our fishing grounds, by calling all this just a “reset”. Unless we can stop them, the reset will end with this country once again in the EU’s orbit, gradually losing our ability to set our own rules and make our own laws. It’s time for those who support our national independence and democracy to wake up.”
Chilling…
Starmer is slated to meet with all EU leaders in February at a ‘UK-EU Summit’ – the first such meeting since Brexit. Leaked documents suggest that Starmer is considering a significant surrender of Brexit terms, such as reopening free movement. If the Tories clearly state they will pull down any new deal reached by Starmer, the EU (who follow UK polling and politics obsessively) will be much more reluctant to invest time and energy in negotiating with what looks increasingly like a one term PM. The Conservatives are given an open goal…
Multiple Tory leave bigwigs are privately urging Kemi Badenoch to fully commit to rejecting any renegotiation by the Labour government. Given that the Tories are still the official opposition, publicly committing to rip up any Starmer deal is an important signal to send to the EU. Time to get that line out there in no uncertain terms…
Former leader of the SNP in Westminster Ian Blackford told Times Radio why he believes Nicola Sturgeon’s claim that she spent no time in the kitchen and therefore didn’t see any of her husband’s purchases:
“She doesn’t have a passion for cooking.”
